No abstract

In this paper, we use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to investigate the empirical link between unintended pregnancy and child health and development. An important contribution of our study is the use of information on siblings to control for unmeasured factors that may confound estimates of the effect of pregnancy intentions on infant and child outcomes. Results from our study indicate that unwanted pregnancy is associated with prenatal and postpartum maternal behaviors that adversely affect infant and child health, but that unwanted pregnancy has little association with birth weight and child cognitive outcomes. Estimates of the association between unwanted pregnancy and maternal behaviors were greatly reduced after controls for unmeasured family background were included in the model. Our results also indicate that there are no significant differences in maternal behaviors or child outcomes between mistimed and wanted pregnancies.

This paper makes contributions to the estimation of health production functions and the economics of fertility control. We present the first infant health production functions that simultaneously control for selfselection in the resolution of pregnancies as live births or induced abortions and in the use of prenatal medical care services. We also incorporate the decision of a pregnant woman to give birth or obtain an abortion into economic models of fertility control and use information conveyed by this decision to refine estimates of infant health production functions and demand functions for prenatal medical care.

In 1968, the Taiwanese government extended compulsory education from six to nine years and opened over 150 new junior high schools at a differential rate among regions. Within each region, we exploit variations across cohorts in new junior high school openings to construct an instrument for schooling and employ it to estimate the causal effects of mother’s or father’s schooling on infant birth outcomes in the years 1978–1999. Parents’ schooling does indeed cause favorable infant health outcomes. The increase in schooling associated with the reform saved almost 1 infant life in 1,000 live births. “The one social factor that researchers agree is consistently linked to longer lives in every country where it has been studied is education. It is more important than race; it obliterates any effects of income.” Gina Kolata, “A Surprising Secret to Long Life: Stay in School,”New York Times, January 3, 2007, p. 1.